The Balliols (13 page)

Stella felt very tired as she seated herself at her desk. Yes; they knew all right. They had noted her bruised face. They were gleefully asking each other what would happen to the head of a department who arrived three hours late with an excuse of that kind. And it was for women like these that she had been spending the night in gaol; that she had been humiliated and hurt. It was for women like these that she had declined Alan Cheyne's offer. She laughed at herself. What a cause to champion. They didn't want to be fought for. They didn't want a vote. They didn't want independence; they were quite happy sitting there, waiting for some man to come along. They were glad they had work, because it gave them an excuse for a latch-key; a flouting of parental discipline. They didn't want more than that. They no more wanted to be free than the negro slaves in the West Indies, who did not know what to do with their freedom when they were given it. What was the point in working for such people, sacrificing oneself for them? One got no thanks from them for it.

There was a tap at the door. A messenger boy presented himself.

“Mr. Beccles says will you please go to him; at once.”

There was a pointed change in the manner of the message. There was no question now of her going when she was ready: at her convenience. It was “at once.” And there was an insolence in the boy's manner; as though he knew that she was in trouble; as though he recognized from the change in the manner of the message that she no longer held the position in her employer's confidence that she had held yesterday; that her favour was no longer of the same importance.

In Mr. Beccles' reception of her there was no change. He was as urbane as ever. Which he would be, of course. He was too clever to be anything else. He knew how to time his pounces. But she knew that he had noted with one glance how the pallor of her cheeks was heightened by the darkening bruise under her eye.

“I'm so sorry to have to trouble you in this way,” he said. “But there is a little matter that I think ought to be cleared up. I
don't know if you have seen—probably you have not—a paragraph in to-day's
Daily Tribune?”

“I don't take in the
Tribune.”

“Neither do I, ordinarily. To-day I had my attention called to it. It refers to a deplorable incident at a political meeting at—where was it? let me see—oh yes, at Colingdale, in which a woman with the same name as yourself was taken into custody. Now, I don't know if any of the members of our staff will have seen this paragraph. They may not have. But you know how rumours start. You can guess how serious it would be for office discipline if there were any idea that the head of a department had been mixed up in an incident of this kind. So I wanted to consult you as to the steps that it would be most advisable for us to take, to prevent any suspicion that it is to you that this paragraph refers.”

He smiled in a spirit of suave confederacy. She loathed that suaveness. He was waiting for his pounce. How disappointed he would be if he were deprived of the opportunity. How well he played a winning hand; with all his defences planned, in case the cards did not fall the way he wanted.

“I'm afraid there would be no point in that,” she said.

“Why not, Miss Balliol?”

“Because it
is
to me that that paragraph refers.”

“Really!”

He sat back in his chair, looking at her with assumed astonishment. Then he picked up an envelope from his desk and handed it to her. “In that case, Miss Balliol, I have no option but to approve the Managing Director's suggestion that you should leave this office immediately. Instead of, as you suggested, a month from now. You will find a month's salary in that envelope. I am sorry, Miss Balliol, that our long association should end in this way.”

He had the skill not to overplay his hand. How he hates me; how he's longed for an opportunity such as this. As she walked through the crowded room to her own small office, she looked in a different spirit at the group of furtive, whispering girls. She saw them not so much as the people she was fighting for, but as the raw levies that one day would fight for her; against men like Beccles. It was with such material as this that she would fight him. It was not only men who had to be fought, but women who had to be roused. Her hatred for Beccles gave her the courage to go into the battle hopefully.

That evening Stella read across two columns of her evening paper the headline “Suffragette arrested within a week of father's death.” There was a photograph of herself as she left the court; a cunning brush had embellished her black eye. The evidence was given in full. On the morning papers the story was relegated to a side column stature. The wording of the headline remained, however, and the photograph. It enlivened every breakfast-table in the country.

In the School House reading-room at Fernhurst some twenty boys were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the morning papers. They had only ten minutes before chapel in which to memorize the chief facts of the previous day's cricket. The moment the papers were flung upon the table they pounced at them, turning the pages quickly till they reached the one page that mattered. For the next ten minutes there would be no other comments than: “I say, Wass is in form again. Five wickets again to-day.” “What are Kent doing?” “Did Hayward have any luck?” “Oh, Lord, poor old Somerset in the soup again.” That was how ordinarily it would have been. There would have been no comment had the Houses of Parliament been destroyed. For no one would have seen the page on which the disaster was recorded. But that same human capacity for detecting the most unobtrusive scandal that on the previous day had made Stella's entrance into the workroom the signal for a sudden silence, made a simultaneous cry go up from half a dozen papers. “My word, look at this about Balliol's aunt!” “I say, Balliol, have you seen this?” “No wonder Balliol's such a tiger in the grovel.” “Looks as though the policeman had given her a black eye, all right.”

Hugh Balliol was at that time fifteen-and-a-half years old. To an urchin like myself on the brink of his first term at a preparatory school, he seemed a very grown-up and worldly person. I looked with wondering eyes at his ties and socks; at the thick long sweep of hair, parted at the side and swept back in a sleek, shining curve. He was the kind of person that I longed to be; but at Fernhurst, in the School House reading-room in the presence of prefects who were men in all but name, he was a nervous, insignificant youth, quite unprepared for the rush of interest that was taken in him, as he peered at the paper over his seniors' shoulders and beneath their arms, hoping by his very smallness to escape notice, since it was “cheek” for a second year boy to read the papers till his seniors had finished with them.

Throughout the morning he was pursued by such taunts as “What, aren't you with your aunt in Holloway?” His form
master asked him to explain the difference between a suffragette and a suffragist. His science master nicknamed him “the Belligerent Balliol.”

He was self-conscious, angry, embarrassed; yet at the same time rather flattered.

His father was coming down that day to visit him. It was early in the term for such a visit. But details in connection with the winding-up of the estate in Devonshire had recalled Balliol to the West. The subject of “the family disgrace” was brought up on Hugh's part with a warmth of indignation.

“Look here, father. You've seen in the paper about Aunt Stella?”

“I have.”

“It's a bit thick, surely?”

“I think it's very thick.”

“Couldn't anything be done about it?”

“Your aunt is a self-willed woman.”

“But it makes everything so difficult for me here. Everyone's been making fun of me about it. Don't you think if she had that explained to her it would make a difference?”

“I'm very much afraid I doubt it.”

“Oh!”

Balliol chuckled on his way back to London over the astonishment that had puckered Hugh's forehead on being told that his aunt was unlikely to abandon a course of conduct that might be thought to interfere with her nephew's interests. He could imagine Stella's surprise were he to say to her, “Stella, I'm afraid you will have to be more circumspect. Hugh's schoolfellows are making fun of him because you've been arrested.” He had a very good mind to tell her. She had a sense of humour. She would see the amusing side of it. It was all very much like Hugh. His affection for Hugh was within its limits considerable. He was interested in him, was fond of him, was anxious to do the best he could for him, was concerned to give him the best chance possible. At the same time, he did not have that personal feeling that he had expected to have for an eldest son; the bearer of his name, his heir, the prolongation of himself; in whom he would renew his own ambitions. That was how he had expected to feel about a son. But somehow he hadn't. Perhaps it was because his daughter had been born first; because Lucy had been the recipient of those first feelings of tenderness towards something that was appealing; small; that stood in need of protection. It was in Lucy's company he got that sense of added life that twenty years
back his wife had given him. With his other children he accepted their various problems as they came along. With Lucy he found himself trying to devise ways of helping her, making life varied and amusing for her. He was fond of them all, but he had to exert considerable skill to conceal his preference from his other children. He fancied he succeeded.

He did not believe that Hugh, now seated at the long day-room table over his evening prep, would feel that his father had any real interest in the world outside his schoolboy son. Over lunch, at which Hugh had consumed two helpings of each of the four courses that had been served; during the stroll round the cricket field while a second eleven match followed a desultory course upon the Upper; over the tea at which Hugh had consumed a plate of bananas and cream, two sausages, three éclairs, two lemon squashes in each of which a sixpenny ice cream had been immersed—they had talked of nothing but Hugh's interests, Hugh's future, Hugh's present. All three were healthily satisfactory objects for parental contemplation. The things that the boy wanted were straightforward things; the kinds of thing that life did give you if you went for them in a straightforward way. He wanted an amusing, healthy, useful life; with a certain amount of excitement. At the moment, his idea was to get a Rugger blue at Oxford and return to Fernhurst as a master; which was the kind of ambition that you would expect of a boy of fifteen who could not see over the walls of his cloistered world; whose ambitions were focused within those limits. It was unlikely that Hugh would get a blue at Oxford. It was more unlikely that he would want to return to Fernhurst as a master. He would have wider ambitions then. But the kind of life he wanted would probably be the same: something out-of-door, practical, administrative. The Egyptian Civil, possibly. He wouldn't be up to the standard of the Indian.

He had discussed Hugh with the headmaster that afternoon. “A really sound fellow,” the Chief had said. “The kind of person for whom, when all is said and done, this system is devised. He's not going to be particularly brilliant. He'll get into the sixth in his last year. He'll probably never get his firsts at any game, but he'll be the kind of man who will be the deciding factor in a house match. He'll be the kind of prefect on whom any house-master will be able to rely. He won't make any particular mark at Oxford; he'll get a third; or if he works particularly hard, a second. But I doubt if he will work very hard, and in consequence he'll very likely get more out of Oxford than those who do. He'll make useful friends,
and good friends. He'll get a panoramic sense of a generation going out into the world. He'll get into debt, but not outrageously. There'll be wild parties, and I expect you'll feel worried now and again about how he's going to turn out. But there'll be nothing to worry about, really. He won't do anything that'll be a handicap to him later on. He'll become one of those people who carry on the world's work usefully; who are never in the limelight, but in their own sphere are indispensable.”

Which was Balliol's own view of his son. He was glad that Hugh was like that. He was not one of those who want their children to be exceptional. He was himself lazily unambitious, believing that such as he are on the whole happier than those who are restless with a sense of mission; who make life uncomfortable for themselves, and for those with whom they are brought in contact. He did not regard his children as the achievers of exploits that would further him in the world's esteem. He wanted them to be happy. He planned their education with that in view; so that they should enter life equipped to make the most of their opportunities.

He returned home happy and content with his day's visit.

He reached his home shortly before ten. There was no light under the drawing-room door. I suppose Jane's gone to bed. It was early, but she was alone. She might have got bored. She might have gone upstairs to read. He walked into the drawing-room and turned the electric-light switch. From the window-seat there came a gasp, the sound of a dropped paper. In startled silhouette against the darkened window Jane rose to face him. She stood blinking at the light; her mouth fell open. The look on her face was so strange and startled that it alarmed him.

“What on earth's the matter?”

“Nothing: why should there be?”

“You look so strange.”

“Do I?”

Her voice was always slow. She gave the impression now of waking out of a dream, as though she had not returned yet to reality.

“What were you doing?”

“Reading.”

“But it was dark.”

“It had only just got dark. I'd come here to get more light;
then the light failed. I stopped reading. I looked out on to the square. It was so lovely. I sat on.”